Game Show Round One. 

Over two weeks, Aphids set up shop at the Brisbane Powerhouse for the first development of Game Show as part of the World Theatre Festival’s Scratch Series. During the residency, the Aphids Artistic Associates were joined by Brisbane sound designer Lucia Ilett and artist Bec Reid and together set the task of testing game play and audience participation, subverting game show culture and stereotypes, and scrutinising the character of Humps- who is the man behind the tan?

Our development started in Melbourne where against a green screen we shot interviews with game show contestants, groupies, casting agents and hosts.  Discussions ranged from casting processes, contestant horror stories, advice for hopefuls, competition and rivalry. These experts’ stories which dissected this glitzy and vacuous world, provided a great starting point for our development of the show.

Our first week in Brisbane was spent testing game styles, from trivia questions about the Brisbane Powerhouse, the history of art and Hump’s personal life, to physical challenges that included favourites ‘junk in your trunk’ and ‘coke head’. Games such as rolling a 20-cent piece between prongs of a fork had less gravitas. These tests were peppered with continued discussions about the strength of our moral dilemma, the direction of the show, Martyn’s hat, and the need for authenticity. 

With six performances to showcase our discoveries, week two was geared towards refining a structure for the games, scripting, developing video and sound assets, and finding a balance in Hump’s performance to allow for personal truth. In two weeks we developed 55 minutes of material to present and test with audiences who also featured as game show contestants. Audience feedback was positive and we are very lucky to follow this development up quickly in April at Melbourne’s Arts House. We look forward to expanding on our initial discoveries and experiments to take the performance to the next level.

It was also a real treat to see performances from around the world at WTF including Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Hotfortheatre’s I Hear Alice Heart I, Posts’ Oedipus Schmedipus and The Instant Café Theatre Company’s Parah. Our thanks to all at the Brisbane Powerhouse especially Zohar Spatz and Sarah Neal for having the Aphids crew in residency for two weeks. Also very special mention to Arts Queensland, Australia Council, and our fab producer Freya Waterson at Insite Arts. 

Whenever FUN RUN happens there is a wedding - this was a 30 year wedding anniversary.

Paradise Found.

Spending 3 weeks in glorious Hobart was a gift! Salamanca Arts Centre enabled Aphids to stretch its legs and let its hair down as we began work creating a new performance work. Whilst resident at SAC we were very well looked after by Rosemary, Kelly, Allana and everyone else.

We started the residency by pitching the non-existent work to each other, imagining what it would be when all we had was a title Trouble In Paradise…
Over the next three weeks we made a lot of work, throwing ourselves into a bunch of making tasks each piece of content building on what had come before it

We worked alongside our excellent new colleague Dylan Sheridan, an emerging Tasmanian composer who has a new work coming out in January for MONA FOMA called Starchild….see it….

All these mini-artworks were made using video, sound, performance, text and objects until we began to wonder what the show was actually about.

Then we pitched the show to each other again, realising that we had about ten different shows, after whittling it down we settled on two very strong ideas. These ideas will be developed over the next few years with this very strong foundation…

Many thanks to Salamanca Arts Centre (especially our personal trainer Kelly Drummond-Cawthon) and Inter-Arts Office of the Australia Council for the residency.

Alongside these very rich moments of process we have also found ourselves wrapping the year up - a year of great challenges and successes. And looking forward to 2013 where we celebrate its beginning with FUN RUN opening the Sydney Festival on January 5th.

Mark Pritchard recalls the wonderful adventures and conversations of night of November 9th, 2012…

PRECIPICE 2:

Notes from the Bunker/Lady Diana’s Bathroom

We met in Fed Square on a drizzly Friday evening, and entered the bowels of one of Melbourne’s key tourist hubs. The dress-code was ‘dilapidated beauty’ – aristocrats eating cabbage soup while wearing all our diamonds.

Listening to rants about the power of thought, art and aesthetics by poet Laureate Ted Hughes and philosopher Slavoj Zizek we were shown through the bunkers and air conditioning ducts underneath the square as well as given a comprehensive overview of the ancient aqueduct system that governs the heating and cooling labyrnth.

Following this we made our way to the Arts Centre where donning moustaches, pearls and monocles we ate cheese around the latrine of the People’s Princess in the John Truscott Lounge, replete with his two Oscars and discussed the problems in how we define beauty.

Temporality

Does public art lose value through out its life? The value of the work is at its highest when the ribbon is cut, the statue unveiled, and then these works sit, stagnate, become lost in the pursuit of newness, mute fixtures in a city’s landscape. Does a piece of public art ever have the power it had at the moment of conception?

Rather than creating something new, we need to find ways of extending the life of pre-existing works. Not just through restoration, but activation/s - public performances and creative engagements for example that open the work out. We need to find a balance between preservation and development.

Beauty

We are working in an age where art is being pushed towards functionality, often seeking to articulate the social or economic value as being crucial to artistic merit. Have we lost the value of beauty, and beauty for its own sake? Why is beauty such a divisive word in contemporary artistic practice?

Canberra is theoretically the most artful architecture in Australia, because of its sense of unity and arrangement. It has been consciously created and beautified. Beauty is often the grand gesture – the symmetry and perfection of line and form. In architecture, beauty is generally used in reference to the Renaissance period.

But eclecticism cannot be orchestrated – beauty in contemporary urban environments must value the old as well as the new, and start to appreciate discordant above the streamlined.

At the heart of beauty is the satisfaction of yearning.

What does Melbourne yearn for? What are we lacking?

The response: My next project.

The yearning is the reason we get up in the morning. The thing that only we can do.

Care

Perhaps we will slow this pursuit of newness if we cared more for the works that are being created. People feeling involved in what’s being created will make them more invested in it, extending its life. The desire to care for something might overpower the impulse to replace it.

There is a sense here that simple gestures are powerful, and simple offers can garner public involvement.

But who is gonna bring the stones to the city? We lingered here in the problematic territory of the here/there mentality that occurs within the greater city of Melbourne. The city doesn’t stop at the edges of the CBD. Highways destroy community. People just passing through without stopping destroys the sense of unity and commonality in a space that is vital for community to thrive.

The Briefs

Initiating a new trend is not an easy thing to do – you can’t manufacture it. The laneway art trend sprung out of necessity and resourcefulness and the pleasure of illegality, and we are now constantly being pressed to replicate it.

We want grander narratives as provocations for artists. We are sick of the standard vocabulary of ‘newness’ and ‘innovation’. These terms are exhausted and meaningless. What is our obsession with creating something new?

The history of human civilisation demonstrates an unwillingness to leave our environment alone.

And now public art is being pressured to solve social and economic problems.

Perhaps the desire to cultivate is a slave to consumer forces.

Paris improves itself, without necessarily becoming new.

How do we improve a space without making something new?

In Collingwood, they’ve turned a parking lot into a park – Joni Mitchell would be proud.

Making the Invisible Visible

It’s time to confront the third space, because the third space is what got us here today. In our cities, we want to see the sewerage pipes on the outside, to publicise their role in our lives.

Moscow is form and function. It is Bauhaus to the extreme. The entire city is air-conditioned by a central system that no one has a valve to adjust.

Precipice number three needs to take us to a sewerage plant. The turning on and off of valves in a sewerage plant is a symphonic event. The technical energy, the mathematics, the systems are like macro organisms cycling, breathing, processing.

De-regulation

We need to deregulate the thing that has been over-regulated. Deregulation will lead the rejuvenation, and liberation.

But no one ever makes a big plaque for something being deregulated, or even rejuvenated. We commemorate and celebrate the moment of conception, the beginning, the founding, but don’t seem able to give the same weight to the thing itself throughout its life.

Overregulation is demanding that we make audiences conscious of the fact they are being influenced and effected by something. The backers need the immediate feedback, the councillors need to have invested significantly, notably, sizeably.

The leap for a funding body, otherwise, is too big to make

Not building

Architects never make the choice not to build. Art, perhaps, needs to decide not to make an intervention.

Permaculture has a principle that there is meant to always be a space with no purpose in a garden– with only anarchy, only nature. And this territory is crucial – this is the space in which we learn and experiment.

But how do we start evaluating non-space?

Are we humans the only species evaluating the worth of these ‘under-developed’ spaces?

Pigeons value spaces as well.

What is the broccoli’s agenda?

We demand an answer, but can never know. The answer is known only to the broccoli. And as such we are faced with the eternal problem of branding chaos, branding non-space, justifying its quietus as an ‘activation’. Trying to develop it so that it can perhaps at some level stay undeveloped.

Is there a vital quota of unregulated space – between too much and too little – that is ideal for a city to thrive?

International Perspective

The kind of conversation we’re having tonight couldn’t exist in other countries. Beaurocracy is culturally entrenched – what’s easy here is difficult elsewhere, and vice versa.

Australia is a country that is still in process, we are young and have so much potential. We ‘re not Paris. Artistic conversation will be most exciting when we stop looking overseas for stimulation. European innovators are looking more and more to Australia as a blank canvas.
It’s got to not look like anywhere else in the world, but in a global economy we want interconnectedness.

Conclusions

We need to deregulate space so that artists can find new uses for it.

We need to seek an ephemeral and temporal occupation of space as important as structure.

We need to reinvent ‘not doing’ as opposed to ‘doing’

and in that: how do we frame ‘not doing’.

We need a social re-education about the value of unregulated space. Both artists, architects and funders.

Photos by Bryony Jackson

Precipice 2 took place on November 9th, 2012.

This article is by Matilda Berger, 16. She was on work experience with her older sister and Aphids administration, marketing and production assistant, Bek Berger. 

Live Art brings a dynamic perspective to art.

Live Art incorporates both visuals and experiences in the specific moment.

Live Art can be compared to live theatre or events.


It happens then and there, not to be repeated in the same manner again.



It can also be considered “Performance Art.”

The audience, large or small, are witnessing a performance of the artist’s work.

Everything about the environment will affect the way they experience it.



It is much more inclusive for the audience as they in some sense ‘become a part’ of the stimulation, situation and mood the artist is trying to portray, as opposed to placing meaning upon a captured mood or feeling in a painting or sculpture.



I believe Live Art should become more frequent around Melbourne.

Melbournians pride themselves in their wonderful fixed art installations. Even our buildings have becomes works of art, like Federation Square.

Admired or despised, they still raise emotions.

We are also surrounded by street artists daily and they succeed in crowds of hundreds of people passing through the city.

The city itself has become a living gallery because I feel the public will engage themselves and their time in the opportunity to relate to the Live Artist.

I also believe live art is limitless, no restrictions on how controversial it may turn out.

Thrashing Without Looking –  The Tour Diary

The tour began with us weighing our bags. Due to having a bag of extension cords, two of us had to share a suitcase, but some of us, needing several pairs of sports shoes and text books, managed to be over the limit all on our own. This would be the beginning of ‘relaxing bag syndrome’ – much more stressful for everyone than performing 55 shows in five cities – involving packing and unpacking before every flight, with a specific tension over who would hold the ‘food bag’ containing the leaky chilli sauce, and inevitably get in trouble with customs for ferrying lemons over state lines.

BRISBANE
Sunny Brisbane began with giant billboards of our poster gal Ulanda Blair shining down upon us. Feeling slightly uncomfortable about staying in a hotel that used to be a famous live music venue, we weren’t convinced that the b-grade mural of musicians with warped faces was adequate compensation. We did enjoy sunset ferries to our venue, The Brisbane Powerhouse, where our vivacious producer Zohar made us instantly welcome, and convinced teen skaters to come to the show at the last minute when board members didn’t make face. Brisbane was also home to a clown who made teenage mutant ninja turtles out of sausage balloons, the West End markets with giant pineapples and a restaurant chain called the ‘Groove Train’, where you could purchase a ‘Spaghetti Alla Groove’.

There were four highlights to Brisbane. One was getting the ending of the show to work, which we hadn’t really managed to do in rehearsal. The second was Kevin, our 20 year old technician who quietly drank fantas in the corner, smiling at our ridiculous conversation, and who seemed simultaneously elated and frightened when one of us told him he should “be a model”.

The third was a group of blondes in their fifties, who we worried may topple in their heels. For the ending of the show they elected to sing Dolly Parton, and halfway through Willoh’s live video edit (always keeping us on our toes) as the video and sound faded out, the charming group continued to sing ‘I Will Always Love You’, a cappella, drowning out the off-key Aphids performers and emptying their champagne glasses. The following night a group of mates had bought out an entire show, accidently missed it and come back at 10pm quite drunk. This led to cartwheeling, a man with a neck tattoo yelling ‘boner’, Liz accidently head-butting an audience member, and group photos at the end of the night. This show led us to investigate the future of the work as bucks/hens night event.

NB - (It is also worth noting that our Artistic Director, who clearly was not happy with how the show was dramaturgically, decided to deepen the image by accidently bringing in the BBC’s news website into the goggles which was showing the current situation in Syria.)

SYDNEY
Sydney was the hardest, coldest and strangest leg of the tour. Whilst not beating Tasmania in temperature, it was the cavernous Carriageworks that had our beanies on, staying past midnight with the other mobile states artists and eating pizza in the dark. The highlight of Sydney was the charismatic Luke George, (albeit a Melbournite) also on tour with another participatory art work, directing Back to Back’s Democratic Set, and cheekily forcing some physical theatre gimmicks on us and generally encouraging nonsense. Another memorable Sydney figure was artist and school teacher Teik Kim Pok, who received free entry to every show for his Karaoke skills, and local artist Tom Polo who for some reason knew all the words to Sean Paul’s ‘Temperature’. The highlight was the delightful duo of Jimmy the carebear and Aaron the superdad, our most invested techs of the tour, with Aaron adding an extra microphone so he could sing backup grindcore versions of the karaoke tracks from his desk.

DARWIN
Darwin Festival is as good as it gets. Outdoor bars in the park, a constant 32 degrees, and papaya salad at the balmy markets. While we had to do four shows a night, this was mitigated by a very responsive audience including cane farmers, musical theatre starlets and rock-climbing drag queens. Our hotel looked over the bay and the pool where the Australian cricket team spent much of their time, making Tristan run harder and faster than ever on his treadmill.

By this point we knew the group was seriously divided. Half of us were in Team Pancake and liked to hit it hard at night and gobble up any snacks in our way. Team Miso liked to wake up at 6am, have some rice for breakfast and then do Yoga. This meant Team Miso missed out on Darwin’s landmark venue THROB nightclub, home to the longest and most glamorous indigenous drag shows in Australia. But the whole group missed out on their flagship restaurant THROB In Your Mouth, and have no idea why the eatery may have closed.

TASMANIA
Salamanca Arts Centre was incredibly accommodating, welcoming us with a hamper of MISO style fruit and muesli bars to get us through Bump In. This is where our new video goggles arrived, complete with Jessica Alba photoshopped onto the boxes, making us feel uber futuristic and somehow cheap and nasty.

We always allowed one ‘site-specific’ scene in each city and for Salamanca we took on the red velvet seating bank, making an audience member in video goggles eat popcorn whilst simultaneously watching themselves in a cinema from inside the cinema – an experience that could only be described as META. Several audience members brought their own costumes and personas to this season, including a man in white gloves who took us to a dance party in a gallery and a man in a bow tie who took another audience members out to dinner and almost initiated group sex.

We also had the pleasure of meeting Jon Saasaki, a Canadian artist who was on the island for the Junction Festival and about to make 50 local sports mascots perform on an oval for 5 hours. It was good to be reminded that nonsense was alive and well all over the world.

PERTH
PICA was in the thick of Perth and we made the most of their bar and got crushes on their staff. We also did our first day shows with school kids where we attempted to make the show ‘cooler’ by swapping the 80s love ballads with MTV hits. This may have had us attempting to rap lmafo, which is certainly a scar to our arts practice. The youth enjoyed the free coca-cola and the idea that theatre didn’t need to be Shakespeare, with one adolescent boy enjoying the work so much he tried to kick people whilst blindfolded by the goggles. Perth was the home to best pash of the tour, (let’s note here that 55 kisses with strangers as your art practice is not nothing) from a young man with curly hair, and also the home to perhaps the first audience high on cocaine – let’s blame the mining salaries.

Whilst the frivolity and good times are well documented there was also the serious challenges, inspiring conversations, incredibly frustrating technologies and always intriguing debate and feedback about the work. As a show that is never repeated, that has a semi-improvised performance within a very tight structure, from a group with varying levels of comfort in creating ‘participatory work’, it never got dull.  Actually it got boring a couple of times, which we dealt with by increasing nudity and occasionally degenerating into mime.

Davina Adamson writes on Precipice which was presented by Aphids and West Space, April 13th, 2012.

PRECIPICE

Series 1. Aphids and West Space in Conversation

RISK, Art and Architecture

There is inherent risk in action /There is inherent risk in inaction.

In a changing urban landscape, where we are narrowed and corralled into prescribed action it is necessary to re-imagine a city.

On a blustery Melbourne night 30 artists, architects, philosophers , an urban economist,permaculturists , urban developers, horticulturists and landscape designers donned their spangled, lizard encrusted, mini pool table thinking caps (thanks to Fizzy Fingers) and cleaved the pomegranate of truth about what’s eating this city.

Fear of litigation is underpinning design and development of urban spaces, despite our evolutionary success in navigating a multitude of environmental conditions. Its not about our actual safety, or design and amenities reflecting the needs of the people but excessive parameters set by insurance companies that end up shaping the spaces and the way we move through them.

If you consider the city as not only a physical space but a collective psychology, then we must consider more than the needs of business and safety requirements of its facilities and question the jeopardising of our freedom to write this city, each participant free to break their necks at their own discretion, or at least the freedom to engage without mandate or payment.

As incredible vegetable morsels created by Julia Mardjuki enlivened our minds, the conversation swung from the radical to the banal, the big global picture to personal dreams of what could make this city thrive as a living representation of its populous.

Jodi Newcombe introduced us to Carbon Arts, which addresses the very large scale risk of

climate change, engaging with government and community. Harnessing the sensitivity,

empathy, skill and playfulness of artists and their ways of documenting and exploring climate related issues, information can be made real and accessible.

This idea was demonstrated by multi-media artist Pierre Proske, an artist collaborating with Carbon Arts. Proske charmed the table with his Dot Blush ( .Blush ) building project. An ingenious method of making progressive, sustainably designed building’s that achieve a carbon neutral state legible through a responsive exterior of thermochromic and electrically activated discs. As the building expends or stores energy it blushes the usually invisible information at the passer by. Helping the thousands of city goers to visualise sustainability.

Independent artist, Natalie Thomas questioned notions of safety. Citing the problem of wandering into the wrong home after a night out due to hyper replication of architecture in suburbia (and the city), council planning not protecting the community from the shock of your microwave crossing the kitchen and your feature wall being plum not teal - a real risk.

On the wall bloomed a parallel sphere. An abstract map drawn of our conversation, layering and spreading with the twist and turn in proceedings by artist Andrew Hustwaite and Denae Valenza.

Angharad Wynne-Jones - Creative Director of Arts house urged us to consider ‘our shit’. We are animals who produce waste converging on a space on mass. Composting toilets would provide a clean and legible way to remain aware of this basic equation of input equals output, consumption equals waste, the inextricable partners of our physiology. Worthy of reflection in Western cities where only one side of the equation gets the glossy billboards.

Annie Raser Roland, artist and horticulturist reminisced about true public space, like the steps of the GPO before its redevelopment as an important Goth meeting place where Teen pilgrims from the suburbs could converge without having to buy a Latte and a Rose and Lychee Friand with Truffle Ver Jus for $11.50. Public spaces for the public irrespective of your position in the social or economic strata.

Conversation whirred and leapt, unstructured and explorative and in conclusion as each participant was asked if they had a single wish, one idea that could be implemented, what would it be?

To the backdrop Film maker, Steven Harris’s apocalyptic montage taken from the history of film, this collective genius decreed:

Clean up the river and line it with deck chairs for summer swimming

A city square that is not a cafe

More gay bars that are open all night and free to get in

More happy green spaces

Composting systems and Euthanasia machines (‘we are animals and we shit [and die]’)

More honesty and transparency

Big sinkhole to drop next to star bucks

Sexier ways to move through the city

More parking permits

A big sandpit, so we could build and rebuild the city

A comfortable space to say hello

Close the city down temporarily on a regular basis

Implement more robot friends

Fix public transport

Rip up cement and leave the dirt exposed

Skateboard studs removed from buildings and public spaces

More informal rocks and cliffs in the city landscape

Elevated babylonian gardens

Moving sidewalks and flying foxes ( to increase actual physical risk)

All hotel rooms not booked by 11.00pm should be free to the homeless.

Or maybe to…

As Anna Tweedale, non-practicing architect and urban economist, concluded:

To abandon the city altogether, and start again in a whole new location.

Just walk away.

Like tumbleweed through a deserted city these ideas may blow through, but maybe,

just maybe, a few may be made real through the necessary beginning of saying it out loud.

- Davina Adamson